The static
form-ideal of painting prevailed until the first decade of the
20th century. The subjective object was
immediately perceived as a whole and graphically recorded by the
intellect, always directed objectively earthward. In
the first decade of the 20th century an answer was
required to the question, what is art? A new direction for
artistic development came with the answer that it was no more than
a visual experience of forms and colours ‘organised in a
certain order’. The new order first appeared in
Monet’s ‘impressions’ and was consolidated with
Cezannes’s reconstruction of nature according to basic forms
and planes of colour. This had the greatest influence in
redefining art, and then cubism quickly severed links with past
standards and definitions.
Photography and
motion pictures today record all events, situations, or persons for
practical or sentimental need. This has freed human imagination and
skills from trying to reproduce reality. The award-winning
artists of our day no longer respond to materialistic
objectives. They no longer have to hunt for earthly motives
before painting. Art has advanced to become spiritually creative.
To display the beauty of an intense yellow it is no longer
necessary to paint a lemon, or search the sky to contrast it with a
lovely blue. Forms and colours can be organised at will into the
given space of a canvas. The aim is to enrich this space by
following the inner workings of the mind beyond the pretence of
make- believe. In this, the hand is guided to a form-ideal by
random thoughts that bubble up in the mind, apparently from
nowhere. The only test as to whether a resultant
abstract creation is classed as art or decoration is that a work of
art has content that is informed by a subject, and stands as an
icon, a version of that subject.
The systematic
search for a new non-objective form-ideal emanating from the
cerebral cortex was set in motion by the painter/theorist Wassily
Kandinsky. His described his response to the world as
follows:
“As soon as we open the door, step out of the seclusion
and plunge into the outside reality, we become an active part of
this reality and experience its pulsation with all our
senses. The constantly changing grades of tonality and tempo
of the sounds wind themselves about us, rise spirally and suddenly
collapse. Likewise, the movements envelop us by a play of
horizontal and vertical lines bending in different directions as
colour-patches pile up and dissolve into high or low
tonalities”.
Behind this
statement lies the contemporary desire, promoted vigorously by the
Dada group, to liberate art from academic stereotypes derived from
the classical tradition. Kandinsky was soon concerned with
extending reality from familiar first appearances. In October 1907
he met Rudolf Steiner, founder of anthroposophy, and
Steiner’s highly personal ideas about spirituality and
mysticism moved him to investigate the non-objective artistic
expression of his own mental state. For example, the
non- substance of Monet’s Haystacks stunned him. It was
also the time to become involved with the new scientific concepts
of reality. At the forefront of his views about painterly
universes was the discovery of the splitting of the atom.
This brought about the collapse of all his certainty about the
absolute and unequivocal solidity of what is real. Barriers
to the senses were to be breached. Here, a particular lodestone was
the operatic synthesis of sound and colour triggered by a
performance of Lohengrin by Wagner at the Bolshoi. His provisional
conclusions were presented in an essay ‘Point and Line to
Plane’, which was published in 1926. This presented the
mature flowering of ideas first written up in 1910 entitled
‘Concerning the Spiritual in Art’.
The use of line in
nature is an exceedingly frequent one. This subject, which merits
special investigation, could be mastered only by a synthesizing
natural scientist. It would be especially important for the artist
to see how nature uses the basic elements in her independent realm;
which elements are to be considered; what characteristics they
possess; and in which manner they combine to form structures.
Natural laws of composition do not reveal to the artist the
possibility of superficial imitation (which he frequently sees as
the main purpose of the laws of nature) but, rather, the
possibility of contrasting these laws with those of art. Also in
this point, decisive for the abstract in art, we already discover
the law of setting side-by-side or setting opposite (the two
principles the principle of the parallel and the principle of
contrast) which was shown in the case of line groupings. The laws
of the two great realms-art and nature- separated in this way and
living independently, will finally lead to the understanding of the
whole body of the laws of world composition and clarify the
independent activity of each toward a higher synthetic order:
external + inner
This viewpoint has,
until now, become evident only in abstract art which has recognized
its rights and duties, and which no longer leans upon the external
shell of natural phenomena. It should not be replied here that this
external shell in "objective" art is put to the service of inner
purposes -it remains impossible to incorporate completely the inner
of one realm into the outer of another.
The line appears in
nature in countless phenomena: In the mineral, plant and animal
worlds. The schematic construction of the crystal is a purely
linear formation (an example in plane form-the ice
crystal).
A plant in its
entire development from seed to root (downwards), as far as the
beginning of the bud (upwards), passes over from point to line and,
as it progresses, leads to more complicated complexes of lines, to
independent linear structures, like the network of the leaf or the
eccentric construction of evergreen trees.
The attachment of
the leaves around the shoot takes place in the most exact manner,
which can be expressed with a mathematic formula-numerical
expression-and science has represented this with a spiral-like
diagram.
The organic linear
pattern of the branches always emanates from the same basic
principle but exhibits the most varied arrangements (e.g., among
trees alone: fir, fig, date palm, or the most bewildering complexes
of the liana and various other snake-like plants). Some complexes
are, moreover, of a clear, exact, geometric nature and vividly
recall geometric constructions made by animals, as, for example,
the surprising formation of the spider's web. On the other hand,
some are of a” free" nature and made up of free lines; the
loose structure reveals no exact geometric construction.
Nevertheless, the fixed and exact are not excluded here but are
only employed in a different manner. Both types of
construction are found in abstract painting.
“not to draw, but to create musical
sensations that issue from colour itself, from its own character,
from its mysterious, enigmatic inner force”.
With the elimination
of figurative associations and intelligible geometrical relations,
the viewer is robbed of all rational and literary aids to
interpretation and is thrown back on purely emotive responses; on
the psychological sensibilities, sensual responses and spiritual
beliefs of the spectators own inner world. Mondrian, was developing
an investigation of the universals of human reason applied to
configuring the human body. Kandinsky was exploring the dynamics
and laws of human instincts motivated by inner
necessity.
According to Sandro
Bocola, Kandinsky’s artistic cannon can only be grasped
directly, sensually and intuitively because it is rooted in the
biological principle of homeostatis. As expressed in
psychoanalysis pleasure is interpreted as the outcome of an
instinctual process. Instincts, the body’s relationship
with the unconscious, are regulated according to Freud by the
pleasure-unpleasure principle. Freud describes a concept he
called the id as a reservoir of psychic energy, the pool of
biological drives that arise from our basic physiological needs for
food, water, warmth, sexual gratification, avoidance of pain, and
so forth. Freud’s drives are our instincts, and he
believed that they power and direct all of human behaviour.
The id in Freud’s scheme is an unconscious force. It
has no link with objective reality. Consequently, the id
seeks one thing only: the discharge of tensions that comes from the
satisfaction of bodily needs. It seeks only its own pleasure
and cannot abide frustration or deprivation of any
kind.
With regard to
artistic creativity, a material or mental vision activates a need
for its physical expression as a work of art where all its elements
are harmonised. This is the inner necessity, which defines
the bodily needs for expression. It gives rise to mental
tensions that are only neutralised by the creation of a harmonising
balance in the completed work. The creative force is an expression
of an ability to think in plastic images. The German
expression is ‘gestaltungsfaehikeit’, which in English
is covered by the phrase- ‘faculty of plastic
configuration’.
There are four basic
routes to the fulfilment of bodily needs for expression according
to whether the intention is to:
-
Recreate the visible
(realism);
-
Reveal the relations of parts
(structuralism);
-
Express inner reality
(romanticism);
-
Evaluate the meaning of inner reality
(symbolism).
Although each
mindset is exclusive in any production process a painter can move
from one mode to another. Kandinsky was a realist before becoming a
symbolist. Picasso was first a symbolist, then became
concerned with structure, and eventually returned to
symbolism.
